My project has involved two distinct components. First, I am integrating iPads and a newly purchased Epson Smart Board into my teaching as a way to model current and effective technology uses teaching and learning in K-12 classrooms.

I used Smart Notebook software in the summer of 2016 with the EDUC 533 class. Each Austin College student was responsible for delivering a lesson to the elementary school students they were teaching using the Epson Smart Board and a lesson they found on Smart Notebook. This was a huge success. The elementary students came to the Temple Center for the lessons. They loved coming up to the board for a variety of hands-on activities. This also provided them an opportunity to see a campus classroom and get some idea about Austin College. The AC students found lessons that worked very well with the elementary students and thoroughly enjoyed using this technology.

Additionally, I was able to use the iPad throughout the camp to take daily pictures that I could later use for debriefing the student teachers. I took action photos and then used AirDrop to show these on the screen using Apple TV. This was a fantastic way to see what happened each morning at the camp and then discuss particulars. Images were then posted on Dropbox for students to use in digital stories.

A second focus of my Mellon grant has been the use of Classroom Salon for inline digital annotation of videos, specifically, videos of student teaching. I have primarily used Salon in EDUC 475A, “The Learner, the Teacher, the Curriculum.” This course accompanies the student-teaching placement for our education students. The objectives and framework for the course are as follows:

Essential Questions:

What does it mean to be an effective teacher?

How do students best learn?

Enduring Understandings:

Classroom management is tied to instructional design

Effective instruction is student centered

The quality of in-class teaching is directly connected to quality lesson preparation (off stage and on stage)

Effective teaching results in measurable student growth

Effective teachers use appropriate resources to meet the needs of the learners (technology)

Effective teachers reflect on and for practice

Transfer Goal: Students will make decisions for teaching based on what they know about learners, learning, and state curriculum guidelines.

Classroom Salon has provided a platform to address these questions, enhanced these understandings, and achieve this goal. Students video record sessions of themselves teaching four times during the semester. Each recording is approximately twenty minutes in length. These videos are uploaded to the student’s “salon,” where they and I can digitally comment upon the video in annotations that are anchored to specific timestamps. The annotation appear in a side panel alongside the main screen with the video.

I provide the students with specific prompts to respond to, dealing with: (1) watching your students; (2) watching yourself; (3) opportunities to respond; and, (4) watching yourself and your students. This sequence of reflection points represents a developmental hierarchy as students progress in the ability to analyze their teaching. I am able to see their videos with responses on specific moments in their teaching. I also can make comments that the students see. The Classroom Salon is private to each student and me in order to build a safe environment for open, honest critique. Finally, students are asked to reflect on each lesson about such issues as:

What worked well?

What could you change?

How close was your lesson to the ideal on a scale of 1-7 and why?

What is a goal you have for yourself?

What have you seen as your greatest area of growth?

What are your strengths as a teacher?

Classroom Salon is a powerful vehicle to achieve our class objectives. I have refined the use of this application, which has recently been updated to provide an enhanced user experience. I plan to have students include these videos and annotations in their electronic portfolios. In sum, I fully believe that Classroom Salon has taken these students to much higher levels of reflective practice than would be possible without the use of the videos and digital annotations.

This project enabled the phased roll-out and testing of tablet-based lecturing and grading. These tools enhanced and extended student engagement and allowed for faster grading and turnaround of laboratory reports.

Wireless tablet lecturing is being used to present dynamic PowerPoint style lectures using the software Explain Everything. This software enables any projector to become a smart board, allowing dynamic alteration and addition to preplanned lecture content. Explain Everything also enables audio recording of lectures synced with the projected screen, creating videos for uploading to the Moodle learning management system. Video file sizes are dramatically compressed with the use of the free Handbrake open source video transcoder software.

Squid: Easy PDF grading

The tablet also enabled handwritten grading of digital submissions. This was extremely helpful for lab reports in Biochemistry. Notating graphs or tables with only text is often extremely limiting. Using a digital pen allowed us to point out or redraw graphs and data to give students very direct, personal feedback. The software allowed copies to the annotated assignments to be uploaded onto a cloud drive, which could then be used to digitally return the items to the students through Moodle. This also allowed a key advantage over paper submissions: a copy of the assignment and all feedback was retained for future reference.

Hardware:

The tablet chosen at the beginning of the project was the Note 12.2 pro, which has since been discontinued. A Note 10.1 or a Windows Surface tablet would both work just as well with the wireless display adaptor and the chosen lecturing/recording software. (A Windows tablet would need to use an alternative PDF editor like OneNote or Drawboard). Each of these devices have an active stylus. This kind of stylus is categorically better than a passive stylus and enabled us to actually draw and write legibly during lecture and when grading assignments. New Mac iPads and some other Windows-based tablets also have an active stylus option.

A WiDi or Miracast wireless display adaptor will enable any Android or Windows tablet to connect wirelessly to a projector through an HDMI port. We have used the Samsung AllShare adaptor but have also successfully used the Belkin Miracast adaptor and the Amazon FireStick. Although it is possible (and easy) to wirelessly display an Android device using a Chromecast device there is no way to prevent a student from displacing your lecture with any image or video of their choice, even from across campus, and as such we recommend against using it. Note: the iPad does not talk to WiDi or Miracast adaptors and an Apple TV is required. These are harder to integrate with the college’s system and may not be possible/easy to adapt at Austin College at this time.

Employed lecturing style in General Chemistry I and II (CHEM 111/112).

Prepared a fact sheet that would allow any faculty member to begin lecturing or with an old Android, iPad, or Windows tablet.

Used the compression software Handbrake to dramatically compress lecture recordings from ~800MB per lecture to ~80MB per lecture.

Used the tablet to record several chapters’ worth of example problems in General Chemistry.

Student Feedback

Student feedback on lecturing format, recordings, and digital grading has been net positive. The digital lecturing style was least well received in General Chemistry. Some early technical glitches that caused communication issues between the tablet and the projector resulted in many negative comments. Currently this problem has been greatly reduced and students have stopped mentioning that issue at the end of last semester.

It never seemed like a very big deal to me: the music history courses needed a handier way to work with and report student listening journals. This had traditionally be a pen and paper thing where a student listed the musical composition (composer, work, etc.) and wrote their comments, observations, and questions and keep track of the amount of time they listened—and did so manually. Students then periodically turned in their journals and grading was a matter of reading through their pages, deciphering the handwriting, and sometimes trying to figure out what composition they had actually listened to. The major frustration, beyond trying to read the writing, was in trying to answer questions—or to even foster questions in the first place, when I didn’t have access to the same recording (or maybe the piece at all). There wasn’t a way for me to hear what they were hearing at any specific point and be able to help them understand that specific issue.

The grant allowed me to begin looking for a platform that could 1) allow the instructor to hear the exact same performance of a work, 2) allow both student and instructor to annotate the performance in “real” time, and 3) make keeping track of student work easier, or at least more organized. Classroom Salon was chosen because it seemed to do most of what was required.

In three years of using Classroom Salon for students’ listening journals, I can only say that it does some things well and other things not so well. Each semester (three courses use listening journals, and at least one is taught each semester) students have the learning curve of getting to know the program. Since Classroom Salon was created for a more general use, the specific needs of the task require a rather lengthy list of rules for use. For example, each time a student makes an annotation in their listening, a heading is required for organization. If that is forgotten, posts are given a generic label and to find a specific comment it is then necessary to read through all of them. Also, since students upload their video from Youtube to their Classroom Salon journal, they can upload any video of any length. There is no way to determine, from the video length, how much was listened to (trust is also necessary for the paper journals, but with them students must list the length of time for each individual piece). Fulfilling a specific amount of time listening is an important aspect of the listening journal. Classroom Salon does not support that.

The small deficiencies in the application are not, in the end, what is keeping me from fully embracing Classroom Salon. The biggest hurdle for me is the amount of additional time it takes to evaluate the listening journals. It is important that students are listening to music from the composers and periods that we are studying. But with paper journals I can skim through in a very short time, looking for length, a certain amount of engagement (by length of comments), and looking for questions (it isn’t hard to look for question marks!). Doing these tasks in Classroom Salon is very time-consuming. I have to look at every annotation a student makes to determine the sort of engagement (length) and whether there is a question. Using Classroom Salon has changed the listening journal from a few minutes per student task into about 20 minutes per student. Classroom Salon is elevating the task into a more prominent place, even primary, in the course. This was not the goal.

At the end of this semester I will be reevaluating the use of Classroom Salon. There is a new version that works somewhat differently that I might try. And there might be new applications that have come along in the past two years that may be better fits. Whatever I find, I am looking for a reduced workload and more flexibility!

My project has been to implement digital annotation (using Hypothes.is) into my upper level course in anthropological theory, last taught in the spring of 2016. I was in the middle of this course during my last update, and now I have had almost a year to reflect and plan for the next offering of this course in spring of 2018. The outcomes were so successful that I would not want to teach the class again without using digital annotation. My update will build upon this previous post at the Digital Pedagogy@Austin College site.

Adding digital annotation into the course led students to dig deeply into difficult texts, which led to two distinct results: higher grades on tasks involving close reading and theoretical thinking; and, more nebulously but also importantly, greater class camaraderie and discussion.

This upper level class is typically small and therefore highly influenced by the particular composition of students, so the numbers below should not be considered predictive of future classes. I have taught the course three times without this strategy and once with it. The “annotation” class did, on average, between 5% and 10% better on course assignments that rely on either close reading or critical thinking about theory (or both).

On analytical papers, which ask students to compare ideas between scholars: 10% improvement

On a take home final exam featuring cumulative questions and asking students to deploy theoretical ideas to new situations: 5% improvement

For an upper level course with mostly majors and minors (students who really care about anthropology already), this is significant improvement. This improvement, moreover, is in relation to the primary goal of the course: getting students to engage with theoretical ideas in ways that cultivate critical thinking, reading, and writing about those ideas.

While impossible to quantify, enhanced class discussions may have been the catalyst for the results above, because students had actually already begun having conversations about the texts prior to the discussions in the classroom. In an eighty minute class, I would have to specify a certain amount of time for these discussions, because students simply had a lot to say about the texts, and the quality of their comments were light years ahead of previous course discussions. (Should any former students be reading this, don’t worry; no one person is responsible for class discussion!). If before, I was lucky to get a response to the my question, “What is this article about?,” now students were making inter-textual connections, and, best of all, asking questions more than being satisfied by answers. I have also included the word camaraderie here because this wasn’t an individual achievement. People seemed to enjoy connecting with each other as they worked on these assignments, and I read the sometimes frivolous posts as actually productive in this regard. This is most evident in the nostalgia some of the students have expressed for the class and the group.

I do have some caveats regarding the way I employed digital annotation as well as some possible future adaptations.

Time: I ultimately added an extra step in my course preparation every single class session, and given when students actually do the reading for class—sometimes in the hours just prior to class itself—this makes actually using each day’s annotations to guide discussion very difficult. I will likely have a deadline of three hours prior to class for each day’s annotations to ameliorate this, though I cannot think of a way in which to save myself the time required by the extra steps, which happen on top of my own preparation of forty minute lectures and re-reading each text in full.

‘Skip Days’ and Toiling alone: I gave each student a set of “skip days” as a way of managing burn-out in a repetitive task. Some students used them early, and others saved themselves time at the end by skipping the last few. This gave the impression (and possibly the reality) that students were not reading the last few articles, and those who had to post in them did so effectively by themselves. I may moderate this by giving students a skip day for every calendar month.

Thinking about class time: However good the effects of this close-reading task for the course’s objectives, the course also has a responsibility to give students familiarity and confidence with a wide range of anthropological thinkers. I have to balance what we do in class and actively resist the totalizing pulls of either spending the entire eighty minutes discussing a single article, or relying on reading outside of class reading to take care of that aspect of the course. Either would be only partially reaching the overall goals of the class.

The next steps: As a professor in a relatively small department, I am responsible for a wide range of courses, and it is important to me that they all be different in content, goals, and assignments. Thus, I am thinking about ways of improving the use of digital annotation in this course, just as I am thinking about its potential in different contexts. One central task of a cultural anthropology classroom is the reading of ethnography, and a few scholars are experimenting with publishing these in interactive digital formats. Because they are often written at the introductory level, one possibility for an introductory course may be to find such a suitable text and to have students read it together through annotation. Another possibility resides in my Language and Culture course, an upper level introduction to linguistic anthropology. It may be possible to annotate digital audio files, like Soundcloud allows, in ways that would help students master that course’s methodological challenge: learning a form of discourse analysis.

Whatever I do, I take away from this a unique opportunity to have students work together in ways that help each separately take on what would be otherwise very daunting tasks. When students realize that nobody in the room has this all figured out, that each student has something to contribute to complex tasks, and that they can master these tasks if they work at them regularly, they learn realities about themselves that reach far beyond a single classroom.

My project was to flip first semester organic chemistry, CHEM 221. I hoped to see a lower withdraw rate, higher grades on standardized ACS exams, and overall higher grades for the class. Based on the initial outcomes, I decided to take the same approach in CHEM 222, Organic Chemistry II.

In the flipped class students watch 30-50 min. of prerecorded video prior to coming to class. Students are then allowed to either ask questions about the videos or work on problems/worksheets that I prepare for the class time. Additionally, students are required to take a post video quiz either using Moodle (class management system) or Socrative (free app) to hold them accountable for video watching before class.

The videos were recorded by me in my office, and edited and produced using iMovie. The videos were then compressed using Handbrake (freeware) and posted in Moodle where students have access 24/7 to the videos. Students in other sections of CHEM 221 and CHEM 222 have access to the videos through a guest account to my course. The in-class video quizzes were conducted using Socrative, a classroom response application. Unfortunately, several students did not have reliable access to a smart phone/ or had connection issues to the network, so they received paper copies. The quizzes were to check to see if student watched the videos on time.

The initial offering of the flipped course was novel to a large majority of the students (only one out of twenty-three had ever experienced such a course). By the third offering, though, the novelty is not as great, as nearly half of my course had previous experience with a Flipped course. This is mostly due to the fact that Dr. John Richardson has begun to flip CHEM 111, General Chemistry I.

For the initial offering of the flipped CHEM 221, students were diligent in watching videos prior to class and the quiz grades typically ranged between 75-85%. For the second offering of the course, a significant number of students did not do well on the quizzes, average scores where 50-75%. Looking at the number of views (in Moodle) on a daily basis, it is clear that several students binge-watched the videos on the weekends or before an exam. This defeats the purpose of the flipped class. When students participate in this type of behavior, they can not participate in class since they have not seen the videos. For the third offering (fall 2016), quiz results were mixed; while some students did poorly, the class average was between 70 and 80%, indicating better viewing habits.

Overall, I plan on continuing to offer my content heavy courses (CHEM 111, 112, 221, and 222) as flipped courses. I find the class much more dynamic in this format, with students asking question about material instead of being presented material for the first time in lecture. I will say that this does require the instructor to have complete mastery of the material, since students are asking more than surface questions. Typically, in a class session, only 2-4 students drive the question-answer sessions. It has been a major comment on my student evaluations that many students do not find these question-answer class sessions to be particularly useful. But of course it is always the case that some students are better prepared for class than others. In future offerings, I believe that I can increase routine student video viewing by increasing the weight of the video quizzes. Currently it is considered homework and is rolled into the homework grade, which is only 10% of the overall grade.

As for overall drop rates, my classes have seen significantly lower drop/withdrawal (D/W) rates in the last three years compared to the preceding five years. The preceding five year period had a D/W rate of close to 20%. This is in response to the pressures of needed high GPAs for medical school. Students on the B/C borderline would D/W instead of taking the chance of earning a C. Since flipping my D/W rate is approximately 10%. I don’t know if it is due to the flipped class or the requirement of Biochemistry for medical school. Students are more likely to stick out the course to stay on track for the pre-med courses.

My students have not seen a dramatic increase in American Chemical Society (ACS) standardized exams scores. Average scores on the ACS exam for organic chemistry are typically higher than the national average by 5-10 questions. This was true before the flip as well as after the flip. I can say that at least the flipped class has not hurt student performance on this metric.

I will be offering flipped classes for the foreseeable future, but I will clearly identify them as such, so that students registering for the course will have an option to register for a traditional lecture if they have strong opinions against the flipped method.

I would like to end this report with student responses to some questions that I have asked for each offering of the flipped course. Students were offered extra credit at the end of the term to complete the anonymous survey. Students were given extra credit if 80% of the class responded to the survey. For three years of offering I was able to collect 77 responses. The answered are given in % response. Most students (~60-65%) believe that the flipped model is better than traditional lectures, while 10-15% do not think the flipped model worked for them and they would avoid a flipped model in the future

Question

Responses (%) (n=77)

1. Have you ever participated in a flipped class before?

Yes

78

No

17

Partial

5

2. Which best describes how you prepare for each class session?

I watched the videos once

15

I watched the videos once and took notes

45

I watched the videos more than once

5

I watched the videos more than once and took notes

30

I did not watch the videos before class

5

3. Did the viewing quizzes hold you accountable?

Yes, the viewing quizzes kept me on track

70

Yes, but they were not valued enough

10

No, they were just annoying

20

4. Compared to listening to classroom lecture, watching the videos before class

was much more helpful for my learning

43

was somewhat more helpful for my learning

20

helped me learn about the same

20

was somewhat less helpful for my learning

9

was much less helpful for my learning

8

5. During the in-class activities, I felt active and engaged in my learning

I am building a class, “Introduction to Computer Science for Mobile Apps,” focusing on the Swift programming language. The defining characteristic of this class (as it relates to the Mellon Grant) is that the entire class will be self-paced and online with lectures and labs posted on the internet. While the primary audience will be Austin College students, the course material will be open to anyone. As a result, this will have some advertising and recruitment benefits since people who are not enrolled at Austin College will have a better sense of what Austin College classes have to offer. Since I was approved for this class during last summer, I have not yet had time to prepare all of the materials. That being said, I have had time to figure out how to record and edit profesional-caliber lectures.

While the idea of a zero-credit online class will not work for every department, I think there are a few takeaways that can have broader impact. First, lecture-based classes that are ancillary to a department are prime to presented in such a manner. After the class is hosted online, we’ll have a better idea of how current and potential students respond to such a class. Second, I hope this class will provide another framework for faculty to produce and edit additional supplemental online content for their classes.

In January 2016 I collaboratively taught an on-campus JanTerm class with Justin Banks, the college archivist. We split the course into two sections, “Graphic Arts” and “Bookbinding.” I taught the graphic arts section and assigned writings to create content for a book that would be the resulting class project. Justin Banks taught bookbinding and the history of books, printing, and the publishing process, including best practices in publication layout. The digital component of this course was composed of creating art through art simulation software and graphic arts/pen tablets while collaborating and communicating with the students via Moodle course modules.

During the course the students created unique digital artworks, each of which had value as a composition inviting reflection from the observer. Each student’s writings and artworks were assembled into a Blurb-published book, the result of which was beautiful. Most of the students began this class with little or no artistic experience and considered themselves to be untalented or (at best) amateurish as artists. In this course they learned that anyone can create beautiful or interesting artwork in the simple-to-learn ArtRage software. The students effectively learned how to use major art tools in a digital environment simulating natural media, specifically, how to draw and paint in different media by using a Wacom model graphic arts pen tablets.

“Night Flowers,” by ZsuZsa Ratliff-Johnson

By the end of the course, most of the students indicated that they would continue to use ArtRage creatively because it was a fun and fulfilling experience. In the bookbinding section, students not only learned three styles of bookbinding, but also best practices in publication layout in a digital environment, as well as the publishing process. They also learned how to marble paper; during these activities, they were taught through lecture about the history of the book.

“The Mountain Scene,” by Anna Centala

The class was mostly successful and very enjoyable to teach. From this experience I came away with the desire to teach this or a similar course again. When I saw the opportunity to apply for the last cycle of Melon Digital Pedagogy grants at Austin College, I decided to apply so that the JanTerm course could evolve to a greater focus on digital art and graphics tools. Justin Banks and I will collaborate again, although the course format will be changed. The art of the physical book will be significantly scaled back to one short, simple one-hour project or a brief lecture overview. The time spent in class with the students will also be shortened. Our days were long, especially for the students, during JanTerm 2016. Justin spent several hours with them in lab in the morning, and I spent several hours with them in the afternoon. This time spent in class may be set at one hour each, perhaps a little more depending on labs with hands-on work.

“The Swing,” by Abbi Rees

In the JanTerm 2016 course, I attempted the flipped classroom style of instruction, in which students were to work on their assignments individually and then come to class prepared to discuss and collaborate with me and with each other. However, facilitating discussion was difficult and challenging. What I learned from this experience is that I need to study and learn about successful techniques that facilitate student participation and engagement. In course feedback given in the final writing assignment, which was an overall course reflection, some of the students suggested that I give more assignments in art creation. They were assigned one work of art to be featured in their chapter of the book and also were given the option to submit additional artworks that would be featured in an appendix of the book. In their feedback, the students suggested daily assignments per each tool available in ArtRage. They indicated their desire for more hands on demonstration from the instructor, working with them step–by-step. I was pleased that they provided constructive feedback and included great ideas for improving the format of the course in future offerings.

“Lost and Found,” by Chrissy Chroninger

In order to increase the use of digital pedagogical tools, in the next iteration of the course Justin and I will use a publishing software or platform, such as Scalar, to create an eBook rather than a printed book. We will teach the students how to put the book together, with a chapter for each student. Writing assignments will be given via blogging. We may incorporate other digital tools as appropriate. Subsequently, the students will develop communication skills through writing in the modern digital age; thus, a variety of supplementary digital tools will enhance digital literacy growth for the students taking this course.

For the 2017 Janterm session, I advertised a class on Arduino microcontrollers by asking Austin College students: “Are you a tinkerer? Do you like building things? Would you rather use your hands than sit still through a lecture?” I promised them that they would build fun projects using Arduino microcontrollers.

Twenty students answered the call and set out to learn and have fun. The students had a variety of backgrounds: computer science majors with programming experience, physics majors familiar with electrical circuits, and students with a general interest in Arduinos. They worked in teams that benefited from their various skills.

An Arduino consists of a programmable circuit board (called a microcontroller) and software that runs on an external computer and is used to control the microcontroller. The circuit board can interact with other electronic circuits and make LEDs light up, motors turn, piezo motors buzz, LCDs display text, and so on. The software is free, and the microcontrollers are inexpensive, such that many projects cost less than $100.

The January term students built eight cool projects involving Arduinos and demonstrated them to visitors outside the Austin College cafeteria in late January. Hopefully their projects will inspire you to try your own!

The MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) controller generates musical sounds that mimic a variety of instruments. The casing was built with an Ultimaker 2+ 3D printer. This project needed a lot of work and expertise; luckily this group of students were the right ones for this rather involved project; they got it to work and demonstrated its features by controlling the lights on their classmates’ project, “Sound Detecting LEDs.

Project 2: Sound Detecting LEDs (Aaron Thomas and Karla Villanueva)

Aaron must be the best brother ever! For his project he wanted to build a set of LED lights that his sister can use in her room. Aaron and Karla built a sound-reactive LED animation. They used a sound impact sensor (similar in function to a microphone) which listens to ambient sounds and detects sound pressure and changes the animation of the 5-m long LED color strip.

Building a wireless keyboard seems the perfect idea for a group of gamers, so they’ve set up to do just so. A variety of keyboards were brought in and dissected, and the perfect solution is yet to be found (it turns out that one can either buy expensive keyboards that are wireless, or make one’s own, which requires some expensive software is needed).

Project 4: RC Land Rover (Christian Thomas and Miguel Rojas)

These students wanted to learn and play, so their project involved building a remotely controlled rover. The rover can be controlled easily with a smart phone via an app and we had some fun in the lab watching it go! Each wheel is controlled separately by its own motor (which we learned the hard way that can burn out when over-used!)

Bringing together physics and computer science majors will spark an idea for a computer-controlled levitating system! This group used an electromagnet and a magnetic field sensor to detect and control the position of a magnet in mid-air. A sophisticated code generated a magnetic force strong enough to balance gravity!

Project 6: Infrared Touch Surface (Kyle Andrle)

This aspiring physicist decided to build an Infrared (IR) touch surface. Rows of transmitting IR LEDs generate infrared light and rows of IR receivers detect the light. An object located between the rows will block some of the light, and an algorithm can pinpoint the location of the object. Kyle worked tirelessly on this project, even when it seemed impossible to keep track of all the wires involved!

Project 7: The Magic Lock Box (Johnny Duong)

Johnny had initially a different project in mind, but after some unfortunate events that led to the early death of several piezo-motors, he settled on a lock box. The box, which contained candy on demo day, will only open when the right knock is used. Maybe it will be used on Halloween for dispensing candy, or Johnny will use this to control the lock to his dorm room to only let in his most trusted friends.

These students took a laser, mounted it to a stand controlled by two motors, and uploaded code that controls both the vertical and the horizontal motion of the laser. As a result, the laser moves in a plane and its light will change direction in a seemingly random way, amusing your cat for hours on end. The students have not yet patented their invention, but maybe they can be convinced to build a few more toys on demand!

Our course objectives this academic year were to give our language and literature classes a digital platform for efficient language learning, practice, production, and collaboration. Bringing technology to our classrooms involved several key components, most importantly the selection of textbooks with online workbooks and the implementation of annotation software as a part of class discussion of authentic materials in the target language.

French 102 – Voyages – “A French 102 student answers questions about vacations and trips they have taken, with instructor feedback.”

A digital, online workbook has to be a second classroom, a space for the individual student to learn at their own pace and to make language work a daily habit. Students complete exercises that develop their oral and written communication, ranging from watching videos and answering related questions to writing in response to short prompts. Open-ended exercises reviewed by the instructor are crucial for moving beyond a pedagogical model based on tests and filling in the blanks and towards a model where students can converse and communicate more naturally and confidently. Furthermore, some exercises are reviewed automatically and thus students receive immediate feedback on their progress without waiting for the instructor to return workbook pages.

We have selected a new textbook, Espaces that Stacey Battis will be piloting in Fall 2017; the new textbook and its online workbook have an even greater variety of ways for students to produce in the target language, including explicit pronunciation practice and communication activities where they record themselves having a conversation with a classmate. This process provides students with a complete language acquisition experience both in and out of the classroom that students find meaningful and communicative, not just busy work meant to force them to memorize.

French 235 – Lanval – “French 235 students annotate ‘Lanval,’ a short story by 12th-century author Marie de France.”

While we are lucky enough in foreign languages to have access to online textbook activities, we also supplement with other technology. This goes especially for the courses beyond the language sequence, where we use two different web-based document annotation technologies for students and the professors to collaborate on digitized French texts (Annotation Studio and Annotate as well as the use of Google Docs for exchanging materials). As students read, they provide definitions and ask questions to help each other interact with the text – again, we are aiming for the creation of a digital classroom that accompanies the physical space in which we meet with our students. These types of interactions in some instances have allowed us to move away from a professor-student model where only the professor sees individual student work and progress, thus replacing the traditional use of single-authored reading responses. In this regard, collaboration platforms offer improvements: not only are individual students’ reactions visible, but we can also see how the group responds to each other’s insights.

French 354 – Balzac 1 – “French 354 students discuss Honoré de Balzac’s 1835 novel Le Père Goriot. You can see the students’ annotations in the background, on the right-hand side.”

One of the more revelatory aspects of this kind of collaboration is the difference between how we ourselves learned to be students of a foreign language and its literature and the collaborative possibilities, and even needs, of our students’ generation. We were trained in a world of pen, paper, and heavy dictionaries, where if we didn’t understand the text it was our own individual failing. However, when the burden of understanding and of deciphering the text is on everyone, and students and instructor alike help each other move beyond comprehending the foreign words on the page, they can together move towards the more difficult work of understanding what the text is trying to do and what interest and value it holds.

The process works especially well for short passages selected by the instructor or by a student chosen to lead discussion. Part of everyone’s preparation includes reading the passage attentively and figuring out what it is doing and why it is important. In the classroom, discussion can then become more productive and more like the kind of work we want students at that level to be able to do. In real time, as we read through a passage together, students can consult annotations, define more words, leave and compare notes, and use all that information to contribute to lively discussion.

The collaborative nature of our project is therefore the most salient and the most applicable to the campus community at large. It is not limited to the foreign language classroom or even the literature classroom, for there are plenty of academic articles and books whose style and content may be dense and difficult for students to grasp. If students are asked to annotate texts by leaving definitions, asking follow-up questions, providing brief summaries, or pointing out particularly important quotes or ideas, they may find academic writing and research more approachable and engaging.

Fall 2016 was the first time that students utilized an electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) in the laboratory component of CHEM 211, Inorganic Chemistry, CHEM. Each student received complimentary access to LabArchives, a commercially available ELN software, through which they recorded all of their data and generated their final laboratory report. This software is accessible from any browser and also has a free app. All ten students in the course had an i-Pad mini they used while in the laboratory through which they added data.

The initial use of the ELN was often challenging for the students. The LabArchives platform was more cumbersome than I anticipated and the technical barriers to utilizing the website, generating new labs, and adding data was often frustrating for some of the students. Some students expressed frustration outwardly but used the assigned software. Others used work-around techniques such as forming a Google Doc with their lab partners and then adding the finished document all at once to the LabArchives platform. At the beginning of the semester I emphasized the need for flexibility and patience as we all collectively implemented this technology, so students’ expectations were usually reasonable.

The objectives for using these ELNs are: (1) facilitate more organized and thorough lab notebooks; (2) encourage more input from all team members; (3) facilitate peer and faculty feedback throughout the semester; and, when coupled with PHY 351, (4) improve interdisciplinary communication.

The organization of the lab notebooks were certainly in flux as students figured out how to use the software. Over the course of the semester, the students’ comfort level improved such that, by the end, they had the process mastered. The organization was, to some degree, dictated by the templates that I provided for the students to use. In this manner, students soon learned expectations and proper layout for recording data through an ELN. The immediate impact of the iPads in lab was the addition of pictures to the notebooks. Students took pictures and video throughout the lab to show the setup, illustrate color and color changes, and describe products. In this regard, the connectivity of devises made the laboratory experience more similar to their everyday lives. This connectivity and familiarity with digital intersection with experience did make it quite easy for lab partners (i.e. team members) to input data (i.e. observations). In fact, the use of lab partners became almost a necessity as one student would perform the reaction or procedure while the other would capture it on the iPad.

As the students documented their experiences in lab, there was an increase in the expression of enjoyment and appreciation for the experiments. This appreciation was also longer-lasting, as students would remark months later how they enjoyed a particular reaction, procedure, or color change. Students’ attitudes toward the laboratory experience were certainly more positive because of the use of the technology. As far as feedback, the LabArchives platform limited the degree of student input and feedback in generating formal reports for their laboratory. Indeed, my grading of the final products from lab experiments (i.e. the students’ lab reports) was equivalent to past experiences in grading digital documents. Certainly more exploration in terms of how students and I can offer feedback as data are being generated, considered, and formulated into a final conclusion is needed. Because CHEM 211 has not be course-paired with PHY 351, the last goal of interdisciplinary communication has yet to be developed/realized.

The challenges of teaching using new and often emerging technologies requires patience. For students to have consistent buy in, it also requires clear and frequent communication to students of expectations of obstacles and challenges that may come. Recognizing what life experiences and expectations that students have, especially with how reliable technology is part of their daily practice, helps make a richer experience for them in the laboratory. One of the opportunities of teaching, then, is to identify these aspects of student life which can be incorporated into a classroom or laboratory. I am looking for renewed ways of keeping relevant and engaging without compromising the academic component of the course.

With this being my first semester, my project may not provide as rich a content as those from colleagues with multiple course implementations. One general area from this experience came from seeing the added element of the excitement the students had for using technology. In many ways, this lab experience paralleled the students’ life by making it possible to digitally chronicling events through images. To the student, taking pictures of life as it occurs is normal. Including more such opportunities into other parts of our lectures/experiential learning sessions seems to be a lesson that can be incorporated elsewhere in our curriculum.